Chương 11 - The Drive Home Separate Cars
The ballroom emptied the way a church does after a wedding, not all at once but in small clusters that didn't want to be first to leave. The house lights had come up too bright and the chandeliers looked smaller. Staff were folding white linens and stacking gold chiavari chairs against the far wall. I stood near the service hallway with my hand on Kyra's shoulder and watched people avoid looking directly at our table.
Elise had put her coat on. She held it closed over her dress the way she had all night, one hand low on the fabric.
Jenna came up beside me without making it look like we had planned it. She didn't touch Elise. She knelt down to Kyra's height.
"Hey, bug," she said. "You ready to ride with me? We can get you out of those party shoes."
Kyra looked up at me first. I nodded.
"Is that okay, Dad?"
"That's the plan," I said. "You go with Mom tonight. I'll call you in the morning."
Elise watched that exchange and her mouth tightened. "Adam, we came together. We should leave together. As a family."
"We're not doing that tonight," I said quietly enough that the couple at the next table wouldn't hear. "Kyra goes with her mom. You and I will go separately and talk at home. No more scene here."
Jenna didn't wait for Elise to argue. She took Kyra's small overnight bag I hadn't even seen her get from the coat check and slipped Kyra's hand into hers. "We parked on the north side, by the garage elevator. Adam, text me when you're home safe."
I squeezed Kyra's shoulder once and let go. She was still in that burgundy velvet dress and her hair had come a little loose from the middle part. She looked exhausted.
"I love you," I told her. "You did good telling the truth."
She nodded, her eyes already a little glassy, and then she turned and walked with Jenna toward the service hallway. I watched until the door closed behind them and the small crowd swallowed them up.
The parking lot was cold. November air came off the river and cut right through my tuxedo jacket. Elise's heels clicked fast on the concrete as she tried to keep up with me to my car.
"You didn't have to send her away like I did something wrong," she said.
"I sent her away because she's eight and this isn't her conversation," I said. I hit the fob and the lights on my sedan flashed. "Get in. We'll talk at the apartment."
She got in the passenger side and held her purse on her lap with both hands. I didn't turn the radio on. The drive was twelve minutes through downtown, past the diner and the county courthouse and the empty school pick-up lane, and neither of us filled it at first. At the second light she said, "Adam, if you just let me explain without her mother coaching her—"
"Don't," I said. "We're not doing this in the car."
The apartment building was quiet when we got there. I parked in my spot and we rode the elevator up without speaking. Inside, the place still smelled faintly like her perfume and the flowers from the gala that she'd had delivered that morning.
Before I took my jacket off, I went straight to the front hall closet. The sofa pillow was on the shelf where we'd left it after we got home that afternoon. The cream boucle one from the living room set, the zipper still undone a half inch where Kyra had said Elise pulled something out. I picked it up. It was lighter than it should have been.
Elise stood in the doorway. "What are you doing with that?"
"Securing it," I said.
I carried it down the hall to my office, the small second bedroom I used for foundation paperwork. Jenna's phone was already on my desk where I'd put it after the private viewing in the bridal suite. I set the pillow on the chair and picked up the phone, checked that the video was still there, screen dark but file present, then set it back down.
I locked the desk drawer and put the key in my pocket, then locked the office door itself from the inside and pocketed that key too. Two locks. It felt ridiculous and necessary at the same time.
When I came back out, Elise was sitting on the edge of the sofa where that pillow belonged. She'd taken her coat off and the shape under her dress was still there, neat and round.
"Adam, you're scaring me. You're locking things up like I'm a criminal."
"I'm locking them up so nobody can say they got lost or deleted or misremembered overnight," I said. I sat not next to her but in the armchair across from her, so there was a coffee table between us. "Jenna has Kyra at her apartment tonight. Safe. No interviews, no arguments. It's just you and me now, in our home. No kid in the next room listening through the wall."
Elise wrapped her arms around herself. Outside, a car alarm went off in the parking lot and then stopped.
"So what happens now?" she asked.
May you like
"Now we sit here and we finally have the conversation we didn't have in the ballroom," I said. "Without whispering, without an audience. Just us."
She looked at the empty space on the sofa where the pillow should have been, and then down at her hands.
